


Perdition

by Dangerousnotbroken



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, M/M, Purgatory, Rough Sex, bottom!Dean, dirty!dean, porn with angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-15
Updated: 2015-03-15
Packaged: 2018-03-18 01:47:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3551507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dangerousnotbroken/pseuds/Dangerousnotbroken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything in purgatory is dirty, filthy. It's never clean. It's not even close. Everything in purgatory is dirty. Even Dean. Especially Dean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perdition

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> This is the result of a brief exchange about dirty!dean on tumblr. I started writing it a few beers in to a Saturday night, gave up, and when I got up in the morning I found that what I'd started was actually pretty good so I ran with it. I'm literal trash. Don't hate me.

Purgatory is filthy. Dean will say later that it’s pure, that having everything reduced to impulse and instinct is freeing and clears his mind, but that’s less than half the truth. It’s dirty and it’s filthy and everything smells and everything hurts. He feels like he hasn’t slept in years, and he can’t even decide how close to the truth that is. He feels like he hasn’t eaten in days, and he doesn’t care whether it’s accurate. His throat is parched no matter how much water he drinks so he’s stopped thinking about where he’s going to find the next stream that’s clean enough to plunge his hands into and attempt, futilely, to slake his thirst. It’s all about survival here, about living long enough to stick your blade into the next horrific beast that comes at you, long enough to pull your blade out of its corpse, long enough to put one foot in front of the other. It’s survival, its existence. It’s pure because it doesn’t leave any room at all for anything over and above the basest of drives.

It’s kill or be killed, bloody and messy and for all the indignity it brings, Dean thrives. This is what he was made for, he thinks. His blade always finds the home he intends it for, and with Benny at his side there’s nothing they’ve yet to encounter that they can’t take down. Some kills have been challenging, sure. Some kills have almost been the end of them. Sometimes, Dean has had just enough time to ponder if his last breath would feel the same if he were to fall to one of these horrific beasts, if it would drift from his lips the same way here as it does there in the real world, but he’s never been forced to find out.

Everything is so much more raw here, though. He feels the adrenaline so, so much more keenly when he sprints through a clearing. The rage that fills him in the middle of a fight is amplified and multiplied until it barely resembles his own anger. It becomes a thing unto itself. When he does eat, he’s like a beast, tearing in to whatever meat his hands can fall on, not asking too many questions about where it came from, and he takes very little care at all to keep the grease from running down his chin and dripping from his fingers to stain his clothes. It seems like a lifetime since they’ve been clean anyway. One more drop of grease is like a whisper against the scream of filth that is his entire being now. It’s swallowed up and absorbed by the whole so quickly he wouldn’t even know which spot was the new spot if he bothered to look.

There’s more sweat on Dean’s skin than he knows how to measure. He hasn’t paid heed to the passage of time since he got here but if he did he would have stopped counting the days since he last bathed so long ago that he might even have forgotten how. There aren’t moments to spare for that kind of luxury. When he was alive, really alive, Dean basked in the glory of an over-long, scalding hot shower whenever he could find an excuse. There’s no plumbing now, and no solitude to enjoy it in even if there were. It’s possible there’s a hotsprings somewhere in this accursed place. It has all the features of the untouched wilderness of the living world. It could just as easily have that too. But even if they found it, even if it wasn’t inhabited by something ghastly and vicious, with bloody claws and jagged teeth and ill intent, he knows he’d just spend every second looking over his shoulder and waiting for the assault to come. He’d never enjoy it anyway. So he doesn’t search for one.

There’s so much sweat, and so much dirt, Dean forgets what his own face used to look like. Even when he finds a clear stream, one that moves slowly enough to make some kind of a reflection that he can latch his eyes onto, it’s hard to look at it and make the mental connection that it’s him that’s reflected back. He doesn’t recall what he looked like before, but he’s certain it’s not this. There’s hardness to the eyes that even four decades in hell didn’t give him, a sunken resignation that says he knows this is all he’ll ever have; a blade and the jacket on his back, and mere seconds of guaranteed survival before something else tries to rip him open and eat his heart. The ubiquitous dust of this place mingles with the perspiration he can’t quite shake and makes mud of his face. Blood, some of it from his own veins, most of it not, mats his hair and clings to his skin, dries stiffly on his clothes until their feel like a suit of armour, restrictive and unyielding.

He could be out of here soon if he resigned himself to it. Benny says there’s a portal. Benny says it only works for humans. Benny says he’ll take Dean there, if only he does him a favour in return. This is a favour Dean is only too happy to grant. It won’t cost him anything, just another small wound on top of the thousands he’s endured over the course of life and death and in between. One more parting of the flesh won’t do him harm he hasn’t already learned how to withstand. He just has to drag Benny’s essence back across with him. It would be so easy. They could press on and make a hard line for the exit. It could all be over.

And all Dean would have to do is abandon the angel. Benny doesn’t understand why it’s even a question, but Dean doesn’t explain and doesn’t take no for an answer. He’s not leaving here before he finds Castiel. It doesn’t matter that technically, it’s Cas’ fault that he’s here, or that it’s Cas’ hubris that unleashed the horror of the Leviathan on the world in the first place. No, none of that is important. His hands are dirty with so much blood, his face is streaked with sweat and dirt and gore in layers so thick he can’t tell where the stains end and Dean begins, but if he left without finding Castiel his soul would be so soiled, so tainted, so dark, there’s nothing on heaven and earth that could ever make him feel clean again.

Still, the search feels so futile. There’s no sign of him except corpses, no indication he’s passed anywhere near them except death and destruction in his wake. It has to be an angel that’s done these things. Dean can’t fathom what else could do _this_ to Leviathan. They’re barely recognizable. It’s hard to believe they ever lived, so complete is their devastation. It must be Cas. It has to be. Dean clings to the thought.

Sometimes, he and Benny don’t speak a word for days at a time except to holler warnings when they fight. An unseen foe will leap out from behind this tree or that, and one of them will bark out just enough syllables to alert the other to its presence, and after the dust has settled and the gore has dried they’ll fall back into silence. Sometimes Benny just doesn’t shut up. He speaks for hours on end about everything and nothing. Dean could likely recite his favourite recipes by heart now, write his biography from memory and repeat back to Benny the entirety of his own experiences without even trying. The guy does love to talk. His accented words rumble softly in the dead of night, those times when they dare to light a fire and sit up huddled around it, too tired to sleep, too jacked up on adrenaline to even feign rest for a few hours. It’s always like this in purgatory, but sometimes it’s worse. Sometimes it feels like madness creeping in.

They speak only a few words on those worst of nights. Benny’s hand falls on Dean’s thigh. The dwindling light of the low flame casts dancing, shifting shadows and the two move silently. It should make Dean feel dirty the way he lets Benny touch him on these nights, but it doesn’t. There’s no room left for inhibitions, just instinct. Benny leans him up a tree, the rough bark scratching at his shoulders even through his layers. They kiss, raw and bruising and fierce. It’s like violence; no room for tenderness in this darkest of places. Benny’s hand is rough and calloused and it leaves pain and pleasure in its wake wherever he touches Dean. He thrusts into Benny’s fist, fueled by desperation and the most animalistic kind of want, and Benny growls against his mouth. Even when they speak, they don’t talk about what this is. They both know it doesn’t matter. This is survival just as much as the rest of it is. They don’t want this, they need it, so Benny takes and Dean lets him, because he gets what he needs in return.

Dean grunts when Benny spins him around, grabs his hips with both hands and puts him right where he wants. His arms brace against the tree for support as Benny enters and it _hurts_ , but everything here hurts, that’s how he knows it’s real. Pain fades after a time, and then there’s just the fullness and the closest thing to human contact he’ll find down here, a vampire in more ways than one, biting into Dean and taking what he needs and leaving behind a version of Dean that resembles the old one but is unmistakeably changed.

Dean wants to cry out when they do this; he wants to vocalize all the things it’s doing to him. The pain is cathartic, the pleasure is a release, the knowledge that he wants this is a revelation. He doesn’t though. It’s bad enough that neither of them is keeping watch. They can’t afford to alert anything nearby of their presence. So he bites down on his arm to trap the sounds that form and grow and die in his throat and forces his hips back to tell Benny _more, harder, deeper,_ and Benny obliges.

Dean is just as rough with himself as Benny is when he wraps his free hand around his dick. He pours rage and aggression and want and need and fear into that single point of focus, that looming release that he chases with everything he has left, and when he finally finds it Dean feels hollow, empty, scoured, but never clean. Not dirtier for having done it, but not clean either. Benny shudders against his back soon after, a low noise in his throat that tells Dean he wants to howl, wants to make so much more noise, but he knows better. The noise he does make says enough.

They don’t talk during, and they don’t talk after. They rarely talk before, either. They don’t talk about it. It just hangs in the air like a cloud of smoke, casting a haze around the pair for days afterwards until the trees breathe it in like so much carbon dioxide and replace it with something breathable. The memory of it lingers still, but it’s lesser after they’ve had time to breathe through it. They still don’t talk about it.

When they finally find Castiel huddled by the cleanest stream Dean can recall seeing since arriving, he’s filthy too. Everything here is filthy. Cas’s beard is matted with blood and sweat, and there’s pale streaks in the layers of dirt on his face that tell anyone who cares to think about it that he’s been crying. That hurts more than anything Dean has experienced down here; more than flesh wounds, more than the thought of leaving Cas behind here, more than his nights with Benny. A smile spreads across his face, wide and honest, and that hurts too, because the muscles in Dean’s face don’t remember how to smile and it’s like standing on a leg that’s gone to sleep. He knows how to do it but he can’t seem to make his body do the things he wants. He forces through it though, wraps Cas in his arms and swears this is the last time, _the last time_ , he’s ever going to let the angel out of his sight.

Benny understands then. He doesn’t say it, doesn’t mention his comprehension to Dean, but Dean can see it in his eyes they next time he has occasion to look into them. He gets why Dean wouldn’t leave without the angel, gets why Dean wouldn’t even think of it as a possibility. It’s possible he actually understands it better than Dean does. Benny gets to look at it with clear eyes, an outsiders perspective, and Dean has to live it so of course he’s biased. Still, when he finds Cas, something shifts, and everything about this place hurts a little less, but it hurts a little _more_ too, because now he has something to lose.

They still go days without speaking, the three of them. Cas is quieter than Dean or Benny even when they do talk, but he’ll go through these phases when he can’t stand the silence and he keeps up a constant stream of conversation even if no one replies. He talks of heaven, of bees. He talks of angels he’s known. He talks of nothing and everything, and Dean listens more intently than he lets on because if there’s one thing he’s learned in purgatory it’s that being alone with your thoughts is a greater punishment than anything the outside world can visit on you and he welcomes the sound of a voice that isn’t the one in his head telling him all the ways he’s wrong and broken and filthy.

Benny’s standing watch the first time it happens. Now that there’s three of them, they sleep in shifts when they actually sleep, taking turns standing guard over the others. None of them sleeps very deeply in any case, weapons to hand for the eventuality that they’re attacked by something the waking party can’t dispatch on his own. It’s never happened yet, but it will someday. They all know it even if no one will say it. But on this night, Benny is on watch not too far away, making slow circles around the clearing they’ve parked in. Dean hesitates to call it a camp. There’s no shelter, and they carry nothing with them except for makeshift weapons and regrets. A camp is an analog for a home, somewhere you stake a temporary claim and leave with a mark of yourself, even if it’s only just for one night. This is just somewhere they stopped moving. And Benny’s not really that far away. He’s just past where Dean could see him easily, not so far that sound wouldn’t carry to his keen ears but there’s an unspoken agreement that it doesn’t matter. It’s survival, pure and simple, and Dean can’t survive without Cas. He knows that now.

The palm of Dean’s hand cups Cas’ jaw, and he jolts like he’s startled, though he watched Dean stand up from his spot on the other side of the fire and walk over to him, watched his arm lift up. It’s the first time they’ve touched since that embrace when Dean first found him by the water. They don’t talk about what they’ve done to survive up until that point, they don’t talk about what they’re willing to do to survive from that moment forward. They both know the answer is _anything_ and _everything_ , and they both know that if there’s anything to answer for, judgement won’t come from these blue eyes or the green ones that stare back in to them. They’ve both built too many houses out of glass to start casting stones now

Castiel hisses when their lips meet, moves as if to pull away, but then his hands tighten on Dean’s shoulders and a floodgate opens. He bites Dean’s lip, growls against his mouth. His touches are hard, almost angry, but there’s still tenderness there and Dean marvels at the fact that the ability to be even a little gentle hasn’t been burned out of the angel by now. How did he survive so long in this place without having that torn out of him, cut away by necessity? It doesn’t matter, Dean knows, because he made it this far and Dean’s not going to let anything happen to him now. Let him be soft, even just a little bit. Dean will be brutal in his place.

Cas isn’t soft though. He’s tender to a point, but Dean understands all too well the desperation that fuels his motions, and when Cas becomes aggressive and starts to take control, Dean submits with no hesitation. He lets Cas paw at him, lets his fingernails bite into Dean’s flesh, and he even chances to let a few filthy noises escape his throat as Cas move to undress him as far as they dare, just to let Cas know how much of a willing participant he is.

They don’t speak. Cas guides and pushes until he can bend Dean over on his hands and knees. He’s rough and demanding but Dean isn’t sure he’d have it any other way. Everything here is painful. Everything here is raw. This should be too. Cas takes him hard. He thrusts in deep and fast, and his breaths come in short, desperate gasps. It’s over before either of them knows it, and there is no time to bask in the afterglow. Benny will be back to trade off watch soon. The least they can do is put their pants back on before he returns.

They don’t talk about it after; not after the first time or the fifth time or any other time after that. They don’t talk about what’s going to happen when they reach the portal. Nothing Benny has heard about it says anything about taking an angel through, and the worry hangs unspoken in the air between them. There’s no point in talking about it. Nothing will change if they vocalize it. Dean just hopes they can figure something out before they find their escape route, because he was wrong before. He used to think that leaving without finding Castiel would be the worst thing, the thing that would stain him so badly that he’d never be clean again, but he knows better now. Now that he’s found Cas again, laid hands and eyes on him, Dean knows that leaving without finding him would have been far, far easier than getting Cas back and then having to leave him to this place. He only hopes it doesn’t come to that. He doesn’t think there’s enough of his soul left to carry that weight.


End file.
